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If you decided to invest in an AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card and then ran Linux using it, the experience is not great due to a lack of good driver support. The open source drivers for the card took a few months to appear, and when they did so in March this year they were lacking a lot of feature support.

Since March the cards have been recognized under Linux, but the 2D and 3D support hasn’t been in place. That means you have a very powerful GPU you can’t take full advantage of, regardless of whether you play games or not.

For 2D, however, the driver problem finally seems to be fixed. AMD has updated the open source drivers today and stated full 2D acceleration for the 7000 Southern Islands GPUs is now enabled. That should make for a much more pleasant experience, and in a number of cases allow more graphics-intensive features to be turned on.

The other good news is with regards to AMD’s forthcoming Radeon HD 8000 GPUs, which are expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2013. As the architecture for those chips and cards hasn’t changed drastically compared to the 7000 series, anyone picking up an 8000 series card early shouldn’t experience the same headaches if they intend to run Linux.

The issues with graphics drivers for Linux will have to disappear once Steam for Linux gets popular. Linux gaming is set to grow very quickly now, and both AMD and Nvidia will want to sell their cards to Linux gamers. Poor drivers and the bad press that would generate will not be acceptable as we progress through 2013.